Why Your Brain Has No Idea What Actually Makes You Happy

Your brain is hopeless at imagining the future.

Karen Banes
6 min readApr 10, 2018

There’s a reason you’re not happy, and it’s inside your own head. Your lack of satisfaction and contentment is (at least partly) due to your own brain, and the tricks it’s playing on you. If you’ve reached a point in your life where you are happy, most of the time, congratulations. You’ve probably managed to fight back and overcome some of the ways your brain is working against you.

That’s the good news. We can override some of the features of the human mind and rearrange our thinking patterns to optimize our life satisfaction. But first we need to acknowledge some of the tricks our brain is playing on us.

Your brain is hopeless at imagining the future

Author Daniel Gilbert addresses this in his book Stumbling on Happiness, in which he boldly claims that man is, in fact, the only living being capable of imagining the future, and then goes on to point out how this ability is highly flawed.

Put simply, when we imagine the future, we tend to imagine what’s there, and not what’s missing. We imagine all the good things we’ll have, and forget about the good things we’ll be lacking.

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Karen Banes

Freelance writer sharing thoughts on life, society, creativity, and productivity. https://changetheworldwithwords.substack.com